Hobby Drama

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

In 2015, Neelix was a well respected member of the Wikipedia community. He'd been on Wikipedia for nine years and made more than 180,000 edits. He'd written several featured articles, helped lead Wikipedia education programs, and served as an administrator for four years. So it came as a surprise when, on November 5th, an anonymous user reported Neelix to Wikipedia's noticeboard for "chronic, intractable behavioural problems", accusing him of vandalism on a mass scale.

First, a little background information. Most new pages on Wikipedia go through a process where an experienced user reviews the page and checks it for any issues. Pages that are inappropriate are tagged for deletion and the creator is warned; users who repeatedly create inappropriate pages are banned. Pages created by admins are automatically exempt from this process, because it's assumed that admins know better than to create junk pages. It is this assumption that allowed Neelix to escape notice for so long.

The anonymous user had stumbled across a handful of questionable redirect pages created by Neelix. Some were just silly and pointless, like "Anti-trousers" redirecting to "Pantslessness", or "Sixteen-headed" redirecting to "Polycephaly". But others were puerile, if not outright offensive, such as "Titty cancer" for breast cancer or "Boobie builder" for breast reconstruction. Many users were shocked to learn that these pages were created by an administrator. Another admin remarked that "if I saw this kind of crap from a new account I'd block it instantly as a vandal".

The rabbit hole went deeper. The reporting user originally complained about "dozens" of inappropriate redirects. As others looked into Neelix's page creations, that figure changed to thousands. You can get a sense of the scale of the problem from looking at this list of deleted pages. Tittypumps, tittypumping, tittypumpers, tittypumped, titpumps, titpumping, pumps titties, pumps tits, boobypumping, boobypumpers, boob pump... and that's just for one article. It soon became clear that Neelix had created redirects based on various permutations of the words "tits" and "boobs" for almost every single breast related article on Wikipedia.

Maybe Neelix meant well but got carried away. One could argue that it's reasonable to redirect "boob sex" and "tit fucking" to "mammary intercourse". But it's much harder to defend redirects like "Titty tumors", "Segmental removal of the titties", "Constructions of the booby", "Hypoplastic tits" and "Atrophy of the titties". And there were thousands more of these! Neelix had created over 80,000 redirects, and a substantial portion of them were about titties and boobies. A commentator quipped: "Thank God he apparently never heard the term "jugs" or "rack", or this would have been many times worse".

Some users speculated that Neelix's account had been hacked, but this was not the case. Several Wikipedia editors knew Neelix in real life and were able to confirm that he was in control of the account. Everyone was baffled. Why would an admin create so many terrible redirects? "It just seems so childish", one user said. "These are pages a high school vandal would make, not an experienced editor."

No explanation was forthcoming. Neelix said, "I apologize for creating unusual redirects. When creating them, I did not think the community in general would be against them. Again, I am very sorry." But he did not explain what he was thinking when he created thousands of pages like "Suckling of the boobies" and "Tumorous titties".

With dozens of users poring over Neelix's edit history, other issues came to the surface. In 2013, Neelix had created an article about Tara Teng, the 2011 winner of the Miss Canada beauty pageant. Teng's pageant win and her subsequent activism against human trafficking granted her enough notability for a Wikipedia article. But Neelix's article on Teng was perhaps a bit too detailed for her level of fame. By the time Neelix was done with it, Teng's biography was over 5,600 words long - longer than the article on the Dalai Lama! The article included five different photos of Tara and such important details as "In October 2012, Teng appeared unannounced at restaurant Szechuan Chongqing" and "In February 2013, Teng was asked to attend a sleepover called "Beautiful, You" at G.W. Graham Middle-Secondary School in Chilliwack".

This article was first noticed by users on the Hipinion.com forum, who mocked it in a thread titled "This is the story of a beauty queen as told by her stalker". The Wikipedia criticism forum Wikipediocracy took note of it as well. The article was soon edited down to a reasonable size, although not without complaints from Neelix - he and his friends accused everyone who trimmed the article of being sockpuppets. This incident was mostly forgotten until someone in the redirect thread pointed out a disturbing fact:

Neelix started making breast redirects immediately after Tara Teng posted a picture of herself breastfeeding on Instagram.

Anyway, the community now had to decide what to do with tens of thousands of titty pages. Some users suggested deleting all 80,000 of Neelix's redirects. But there were some good ones mixed in with the bad. And what to do with Neelix? This behavior would have gotten a normal user blocked within minutes, but Neelix was a respected admin. It didn't seem right to block him.

After several days of discussion, the noticeboard report ended with Neelix being banned from creating redirects but keeping his admin privileges. No longer able to make boob redirects, Neelix voluntarily gave up his adminship and retired from Wikipedia. A new deletion criterion was invented: any redirect created by Neelix could be instantly deleted without discussion.

It took until April 2018 to delete all the titty redirects.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here